Simon Rowberry [ to JM's "I was browsing thru an
article about Vannevar Bush's original project,named "Memex," and its
development, almost twenty years later, by Theodor Holm Nelson and Andries van
Dam ( Project "Xanadu") in the field of technology"] : It's worth
noting that Ted Nelson gained permission to use Pale Fire for a hypertext
demonstration in the late 1960s at Brown University, although the idea was
rejected by his co-workers, if I recall correctly.
JM: Amazing and precious information!
It's such a pity that most Nabokovians shun Freud and his
pioneering work on "overdetermination and nodal points" ("The
Interpretation of Dreams," where we find a lot more besides the
off-hand Nabokovian "umbrella"), for I understand that the manifest
content of a "dream", such as his novel "Ada," carries imagetic and
verbal seeds of distinct and independent, most often unconscious
"causal" chains, related to the oscillating drift of some of its
sentences, even chapters ( these might next open into a kind of
"sub-aquatic" hypertext...)
....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
btw: Intrigued by the Latin words "Nunc id vides,
nunc ne vides," ("now you can see, now you can't") which I
read today, I checked them to reach, through wiki, "The Invisible
College,"[...] "a precursor to the Royal Society of the United Kingdom. It
consisted of a group of natural philosophers (scientists) including Robert
Boyle, John Wilkins, John Wallis, John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren
and William Petty. In letters in 1646 and 1647, Boyle refers to "our invisible
college" or "our philosophical college". The society's common theme was to
acquire knowledge through experimental investigation.In its turn the
"Hartlibians", a circle of people around Samuel Hartlib, were the precursors to
the Invisible College...The idea of an invisible college became influential in
seventeenth century Europe, in particular, in the form of a network of savants
or intellectuals exchanging ideas. This is an alternative model to that of the
learned journal, dominant in the nineteenth century. The invisible college idea
is exemplified by the network of astronomers, professors, mathematicians, and
natural philosophers in 16th century Europe. Men such as Johannes Kepler, Georg
Joachim Rheticus, John Dee and Tycho Brahe passed information and ideas to each
other in an invisible college. One of the most common methods used to
communicate was through marginalia, annotations written in personal copies of
books that were loaned, given, or sold...The term now refers mainly to the free
transfer of thought and technical expertise, usually carried out without the
establishment of designated facilities or institutional authority, spread by a
loosely connected system of word-of-mouth referral or localized bulletin-board
system, and supported through barter (i.e. trade of knowledge or services) or
apprenticeship...In the arts and humanities, a field of scholarly inquiry that
virtually originated as an invisible college is the study of film history...The
invisible college is akin to the old guild system, yet holds no sway in
recognized scholastic, technical or political circles...Members of an invisible
college are often today called independent scholars. In short, the invisible
college is a grassroots educational system. The concept of invisible college was
developed in the sociology of science by Diane Crane (1972) building on Derek J.
de Solla Price's work on citation networks. It is related, but significantly
different, from other concepts of expert communities, such as 'Epistemic
communities' (Haas, 1992) or Community of Practice (Wenger, 1998). Recently, the
concept was applied to the global network of communications among scientists by
Caroline S. Wagner in 'The New Invisible College: Science for Development.'
(Brookings 2008) It was also referred to Clay Shirky's book Cognitive
Surplus."